Browsing by Author "Swanepoel, Mardu Christof"

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    Smart dock for bicycle protection in theft-prone urban areas
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Swanepoel, Mardu Christof; Booysen, M. J.; Smit, W. J.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cycling, when utilised as a form of transport in an urban environment, holds valuable benefits and sustainable advantages for a wide variety of stakeholders. Various barriers exist that contribute to a low user adoption of cycling in an urban area, despite a high and growing user adoption of recreational cycling. Bicycle theft and inadequate bicycle storage facilities for on-street urban bicycle storage are amongst these barriers identified. In theft-prone urban areas, urban cyclists are hampered by the prevalence of theft when bicycles are temporarily secured during urban commuting trips. This can negatively affect an individual’s attitude towards urban cycling, and thereby increase the difficulty for regional authorities to draw from the advantages accompanying a high urban-cycling prevalence. This study proposes an on-street smart bicycle dock that is capable of adequately protecting a bicycle during an urban commuting stop-over, thereby aiding in the removal of the related barriers weighing against a higher user adoption of urban cycling. To ensure a successful and sustainable solution, three important stakeholders were considered in order to incorporate their requirements and behaviour into the solution. Bicycle thieves were interviewed and studied to understand the methods and motives involved in urban bicycle theft, active cyclists were investigated through questionnaires to understand their requirements and attitude towards a potential solution, while a local municipal and academic institution involved in the potential implementation of the solution were engaged with to understand and incorporate their needs and requirements. A conceptual solution that serves as the research model was produced by turning the relevant insights obtained from the research activities into product design specifications that served as a quantitative template to guide the development of the conceptual solution. The resulting solution was broken up into four functional areas that were developed separately but dependent on each other, after which they were combined to collectively form the final solution. The first solution area sees the development of a mechanical steel frame that secures a bicycle docked in the system, by physically locking its wheels and frame using a novel locking method. This frame protects the bicycle’s critical components against the majority of tools and methods commonly used in bicycle theft, and was found to provide better protection than existing solutions, accept against theft using a hacksaw where only 71% of the required protection was provided. The second area sees the development of a sensing system that uses force transducers situated below the bicycle, to convert any disturbance on the bicycle into a digital time-discrete signal that is processed by a signal processing algorithm developed, in order to detect any attempt of theft performed on the docked bicycle. The sensing system obtained a false-negative rate of 8%, a detection duration of 8.6 seconds, and a false-positive rate of 15%. The third area sees the development of a locking mechanism that engages and disengages the mechanical frame’s protection in 1.4 seconds, in a way that is universally accessible to different users without them requiring a physical method of access. The lock obtained a locking reliability of 96%. The fourth area sees the development and implementation of system elements that are responsible for the system’s integration and general control, including a system state machine, user interface, cloud platform, and communication capabilities with accompanying communication protocol for the various system elements. The resulting solution’s performance was measured through five tests aimed at addressing different performance areas of the solution. The overall performance of the model is determined as satisfactory, with it meeting the majority of the initial requirements and specifications defined, and thereby successfully addressing the problem statement relevant to this research.